[78] As is the custom in the exploitation of proprietary medicines, the preparation which is the firm’s main output--the leader--is made to do duty as an advertising medium for auxiliary preparations. Thus the Angier Emulsion booklet advises the use of Angier’s Throat Tablets. These tablets are alleged to be composed essentially of elm bark and petroleum, are claimed to “promote appetite and aid digestion,” and it is stated that “their healing action on all mucous surfaces makes them decidedly beneficial, not only to the pulmonary tract but on the digestive areas as well.” Angier’s Throat Tablets were examined in the Association’s Laboratory to determine the amount and kind of petroleum present in the tablets. Extraction of the tablets with ether yielded a petroleum product which resembled in every way the product obtained from the emulsion. Slightly less than 12 per cent. of the tablet was composed of the petroleum oil. The part insoluble in ether appeared to consist essentially of elm bark, with gum and sugar. LABORATORY REPORT The statements regarding the identity of the “petroleum” are so unsatisfactory and contradictory (in one place “refined petroleum specially purified for the purpose,” in another “specially purified crude petroleum”--in one place “medicinal” and in another “purely mechanical in its action”) that the help of the Chemical Laboratory of the Association was invoked to establish the character of the petroleum product and to determine the presence or absence of sodium benzoate, at one time declared by the manufacturers to be present but later omitted from the formula. The Association’s chemists reported: “From a specimen of Angier’s Emulsion recently purchased there was separated by the customary methods of analysis, a yellow fluorescent, unsaponifiable, semi-solid residue which has all the properties of ordinary yellow petrolatum of a consistence somewhat softer than the product described in the Pharmacopeia. It was much more dense than the colorless, non-fluorescent liquid petrolatum now in vogue as a laxative. The preparation contained benzoate, both in the form of free benzoic acid and also in the form of a water-soluble salt probably sodium benzoate.” The petroleum product contained in the emulsion was thus shown to be intermediate between the ordinary (solid) and the liquid petrolatum. It also appears that a benzoate is still present, though no longer mentioned in the formula.--(_From The Journal A. M. A., Sept. 12, 1914._) PHECOLATES, PHECOLAX, PHECOZYMES AND PHECOTONES Report of the Council on Pharmacy and Chemistry